irst time in blissful
ignorance of these other things, and even of what has been said of them;
or he who has, by accident or design, toiled through the twenty volumes
of the others and comes upon Her. My own case is the former: and I am
far from quarrelling with it. But I sometimes like to fancy--now that I
have reversed the proceeding--what it would have been like to dare the
voices--the endless, dull, half-meaningless, though not threatening
voices--of those other books--to refrain even from the appendix to the
_Memoires_ as such, and never, till the _Modern Greekess_ has been
dispatched, return to and possess the entire and perfect jewel of
_Manon_. I used to wonder, when, for nearer five and twenty than twenty
years, I read for review hundreds of novels, English and French, whether
anybody would ever repeat Prevost's extraordinary spurt and "sport" in
this wonderful little book. I am bound to say that I never knew an
instance. The "first book" which gives a promise--dubious it may be, but
still promising--and is never followed by anything that fulfils this, is
not so very uncommon, though less common in prose fiction than in
poetry. The not so very rare "single-speech" poems are also not real
parallels. It is of the essence of poetry, according to almost every
theory, that it should be, occasionally at least, inexplicable and
unaccountable. I believe that every human being is capable of poetry,
though I should admit that the exhibition of the capability would be in
most cases--I am sure it would be in my own--"highly to be deprecated."
But with a sober prose fiction of some scope and room and verge it is
different. The face of Helen; the taste of nectar; the vision of the
clouds or of the sea; the passion of a great action in oneself or
others; the infinite poignancy of suffering or of pleasure, may
draw--once and never again--immortal verse from an exceedingly mortal
person. Such things might also draw a phrase or a paragraph of prose.
But they could not extract a systematic and organised prose tale of some
two hundred pages, each of them much fuller than those of our average
six-shilling stuff; and yet leave the author, who had never shown
himself capable of producing anything similar before, unable to produce
anything in the least like it again. I wonder that the usual literary
busybodies have never busied themselves--perhaps they have, for during a
couple of decades I have not had the opportunity of knowing everyt